Never Too Late for Bushy Tails

By Patrick Durkin, Contributing Writer

Hours after my oldest daughter, Leah, arrowed her first whitetail at age 12, I realized I’d helped her do something I’d long preached against: hunt deer without first hunting squirrels. But at least she hadn’t gone straight from hunter-education class in March 1997 to the deer woods that September. She’d been tagging along with me on goose, grouse, turkey, small-game and deer hunts since age 3 and she’d hunted turkeys with her 20-gauge shotgun five months earlier.

Or was I just making excuses? The fact remained she’d bypassed squirrel hunting for deer hunting. Baby Boomers like me never imagined such shortcuts 40 years ago, believing we must work our way up to deer, but “deer first” is today’s norm—and it’s not just the grumpy old man in me talking.

According to “The Future of Hunting and the Shooting Sports”—a 2008 report by Responsive Management—78 percent of today’s hunters hunt whitetails each year while only 16 percent hunt squirrels. True, the report shows squirrels (22 percent) outrank whitetails (20 percent) as the animal today’s hunters first sought, but that’s only because Baby Boomers dominate the hunting ranks.

Maybe all that chafing guilt helped motivate Leah and me to visit my uncle’s farm when squirrel season opened the following September. Right or wrong, she owed squirrels her due, so we slipped out the farmhouse’s kitchen door before dawn and scaled a limestone ridge that’s rich in oaks.

As dawn lit the woods, we crested the ridge and dropped beneath the skyline then hunched below the ridge’s spine and still-hunted toward the property line. We paused occasionally to raise a mouth call and imitate barking squirrels. If nothing else, we showed we meant business.

After an hour of stealthy walking and frequent stop-and-watch sessions, we hadn’t seen or heard one squirrel. I felt frustrated, even discouraged, when we reached the property line’s fence. We leaned against a big red oak to discuss our next move.
Then a squirrel barked 100 yards behind us. We had just been there! Maybe we had aggravated him in passing and he now felt safe rebuking us. Or was it taunting?

“Let’s sneak back,” I suggested. Leah probably thought we were wasting time but followed anyway. We reached the site but no squirrel. We waited. Five minutes passed, then 10. Finally, I spotted a gray squirrel perched in a hickory, its tail flicking nervously. As I pointed Leah toward it, the squirrel leapt to another tree. Leah lined up her rifle, searching for a clear shot.

Crack!

Long pause.

Crack!

Short pause.

Crack!

Leah whispered certainties that she had gotten it. We stalked ahead then she propped up her rifle against a maple as I circled toward our last sighting. Seconds later Leah spotted the squirrel 10 feet above us, sneaking sideways on a nearby tree. Her .22 cracked. The squirrel rolled from the branch, hung briefly by a rear leg and fell with a thud.
She hurried toward it, grabbed its gray tail and hoisted the squirrel proudly. I hadn’t seen a smile so bright and pretty since her first deer a year before.

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1.7M

The number of hunters who pursued squirrels in 2011 for a combined 21 million days afield, ranking squirrel hunting as the No. 1 choice in small-game hunting.

16%

Percentage of hunters who pursue squirrels every fall, ranking third behind whitetail deer and wild turkeys.

26%

Minnesota hunters took an average of 7.8 squirrels each in 1999-2000 and 9.8 squirrels in 2010-2011—a 26 percent increase.

fast fact

The cackling goose, a smaller-bodied goose prominent in Canada and Alaska, is a tundra-breeder with considerably more black plumage than the Canada. At one time, the cackling goose was considered the smallest subspecies of the Canada, but is now recognized as a separate species.